Hoffman made unhappiness a joy to watch

The Oscar- winning Philip Seymour Hoffman, 46, died apparently of a drug overdose.

It was clear, at least since he won the Oscar in 2006 for “Capote,” that Philip Seymour Hoffman was an unusually fine actor. Really though, it was clear long before that, depending on when and where you started paying attention.

Maybe it was when he and John C. Reilly burned up the stage at the Circle in the Square in the 2000 revival of Sam Shepard's “True West.” Or maybe it was even earlier, in the wrenching telephone scene in “Magnolia,” the disturbing telephone scenes in “Happiness,” or the sad self-loathing of “Boogie Nights.”

Or maybe it was the smug self-possession of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” that made many aware of his special combination of talent, discipline and fearlessness.

Further evidence isn't hard to find.

Hoffman worked a lot over the past 15 years or so and nearly always did something memorable.

His dramatic roles in middle-sized movies were distinguished by how far he was willing to go into the souls of flawed, even detestable characters.

As the heavy, the weird friend or the volatile co-worker in a big commercial movie he could offer not only comic relief but also the specific pleasure that comes from encountering an actor who takes his art seriously no matter the project.

He may have specialized in unhappiness, but you were always glad to see him.

Hoffman's gifts were widely celebrated while he was alive. But the shock of his death Sunday revealed, too soon and too late, the astonishing scale of his greatness and the solidity of his achievement.

We did not lose just a very good actor. We may have lost the best one we had.

He was only 46, and his death, apparently from a drug overdose, shortened a career that was already monumental.

The schoolteacher in “25th Hour” and the lonely predator in “Happiness” are both indelibly creepy. The priest of “Doubt” and the would-be criminal of “Before the Devil Knows You're Dead” are potentially much worse.

These aren't antiheroes in the cable television, charismatic bad-boy sense of the term. They are thoroughly awful people: pathetic, repellent, undeserving of sympathy. Hoffman rescued them from contempt precisely by refusing any easy route to redemption.

He didn't care if we liked any of these sad specimens. The point was to make us believe them and to recognize in them — in him — a truth about ourselves that we might otherwise have preferred to avoid.